Running Citrix Apps using NAL Objects

PROBLEM: For our desktops, we've standardized on the Novell Application Launcher as our menuing system. That somewhat complicates accessing our Citrix applications. Using Citrix Program Neighborhood is essentially unmanageable. Nfuse is another menuing system altogether. We needed a manageable way to run our Citrix published apps using pass-through authentication to the Citrix server using NAL objects.

SOLUTION: Our solution is create application objects that start up wfica32.exe with a parameter pointing to an ica file in a ZENworks folder on the local hard drive. If the file does not exist, it copies one down from one of our ZENworks servers. The ica file is configured with all the settings to start the published application and pass along the local credentials to authenticate to the Citrix server. It's very seamless for our users. If we need to update the settings in the ica file, we update the copy on the server, bump up the version number of the application object, and the new ica file automatically gets distributed.